The new internet from CERN could change all that. The proposed system averages speeds of up to 10,000 times the typical broadband connection today. The new internet is known as "the
grid" and could send the entire Rolling Stones catalog from Britain to Japan in two seconds, a scenario akin to the RIAA's worst nightmare.

Among the fields the new internet may revolutionize are online gaming, holographic image transmission, and HD video telephony. Under the new internet you would be able to complete a high definition video telephony call for the price of a normal call on a land line.

David Britton, professor of physics at Glasgow University says that the grid will surpass many peoples current conceptions of the internet. He states, "With this kind of computing power, future generations will have
the ability to collaborate and communicate in ways older people like me
cannot even imagine."

After years of work the grid is coming online this summer on what is termed the "red button day". The new network will help to transmit the massive data load from CERN's new Large
Hadron Collider (LHC).

The LHC designed to probe some of the most complex mysteries of the physics world is a prime example of research application, which would be impossible without the grid. The LHC creates an amount of data equivalent to the content of 56 million CDs annually -- or a little more than 36 petabytes per year. If the data demands were steady this would equate to almost two CDs per second, but unsteady demand leads to a need for the ability to transmit dozens or more CDs worth of data in a second.

The demands of the LHC meant that the CERN scientists could not use the traditional internet, created by CERN researcher Sir Tim Berners-Lee, for fear of a worldwide collapse. The current internet, a hodge-podge of high speed equipment and older equipment originally designed to work with telephone calls, simply is not robust enough to handle the capacity needed for the LHC or other potential future internet applications.

The grid, on the other hand, has been built from the ground up to a high tech standard. It utilizes almost entirely fiber optics and has numerous cutting-edge routing centers. The new network will not be slowed by outdated components. The new grid already has 55,000 servers, and this is expected to rise to 200,000 within two years.

Professor Tony Doyle, technical director of the grid project explains the need for it, stating, "We need
so much processing power, there would even be an issue about getting enough
electricity to run the computers if they were all at CERN. The only answer
was a new network powerful enough to send the data instantly to research
centres in other countries."

The new "parallel internet" runs along fiber optic lines from CERN to 11 research locations in the United States, Canada, the
Far East, Europe and around the world. Each of these 11 locations radiates out to other academic locations, using existing academic high-speed networks. In Britain, 8,000 servers are current online and it is projected that by the fall a student at any university could connect to the grid rather than the traditional internet.

Ian Bird, project leader for CERN's high-speed computing project, believes that the grid will make desktop data storage obsolete. With the incredible speeds and data rates, it is only a matter of time, he says, before people entrust all their information to the internet. Says Bird, "It will lead to what’s known as cloud computing, where people keep all their
information online and access it from anywhere."

By using its blazing speed, the grid can leverage the power of thousands of connected computers, when challenged with a particularly tough task. Researchers hope the new power will allow the LHC to detect a Higgs boson, an elusive never-before seen theoretical particle, which is supposed to be what gives matter mass. The LHC will only be able to detect a few thousand particles a year and will need to leverage the grid's full power to analyze these particles in coming years.

It is uncertain whether the grid will branch into a domestic network, or whether business will elect to build their own similar networks. Some telecom providers and businesses are beginning to implement one of the grid's most powerful features, so-called
dynamic switching. Dynamic switching gives the user a dedicated channel during a particularly big task. This can allow a movie to be downloaded in 5 seconds instead of 3 hours.

For now students and other researchers such as astronomers and molecular biologists will be able to use the grid, though. Using the grid's power scientists analyzed 140 million possible malaria fighting compounds to develop more effect drugs. This analysis would have taken a traditional internet PC hundreds of years.

Doyle believes strongly that the grid's technology is coming soon to businesses and the consumer. He says, "Projects like the grid will bring huge changes in business and society as
well as science. Holographic video conferencing is not that far away. Online gaming could
evolve to include many thousands of people, and social networking could
become the main way we communicate. The history of the internet shows you cannot predict its real impacts but we
know they will be huge."

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Telecomm companies have to actually invest money to upgrade their systems for it. We can't even get them to upgrade their hardware enough to give us FiOS level connections. I doubt they'd spend the money to have fiber all over the US and servers adequate enough to support that level of traffic. At least at a price that the majority of us can afford.

It's just like with the original internet: starts off with universities and the government, then spreads to the consumer little by little. It'll probably be years before it really impacts us, but then again, you never know.

Yeah. It only took the current form of the Internet 50 years to get from where it started to where it is now. So I guess we'll be using this around 2060 or so. I'll be dead by then, so I guess it doesn't really matter to me.

Not necessarily THAT long. Now that the internet has a place in the world, rolling out a new one shouldn't take nearly as long as introducing an entirely unheard of technology that no one knows what to do with yet.

The internet, as a mass consumer item has only existed as a since 1995 (ish). In 13 years we have moved from dialup, to ISDN, to DSL/Cable, and recently FiOS. Yes, it will take years to upgrade our infrastructure to fiber and 'the grid', but it's underway. It took decades for the telephone to become ubiquitous, but from a historical perspective it's adoption was rapid. FiOS will roll out much faster then the original telephone.

And once FiOS is everywhere, somebody will invent flux capacitating fiber, and we'll all be agonizing at how slow the Telco's are at rolling it out.

The telecomms haven't even finished paying off all the copper that they put in the ground that's already been torn out and replaced by fiber trunks. Don't count on any major infrastructure upgrades in the next decade.